Benedict J. Fernandez was born on April 5, 1936 in New York City, in the
Hispanic neighborhood of East Harlem. His father came to
America via Puerto Rico, and his mother an Italian American. His photographic
education began at age six when he was given a Brownie box camera.

His early career was not in photography. He worked as an operating
engineer/crane operator at Bethlehem Steel Shipyard in Hoboken. It was as a
crane operator, that he photographed his fellow shipyard workers, which became
his first major portfolio "Riggers". He went on to work at the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, in the same capacity, until the facility closed in 1963. At that time he
decided to turn his long time hobby into his life's work. He came to the
attention of Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director and graphic
designer. Brodovitch invited him to enroll in his Design Laboratory and became
Fernandez's most influential mentor. Brodovitch arranged for Ben to become the
darkroom tech and manager at Parsons School of Design. Nobody could have
imagined in those very early days what a significant role Ben would eventually
play at Parsons.

BENEDICT J. FERNANDEZ, THE EDUCATOR

With Brodovitch's encouragement Ben went on to found the Photo Film
Workshop, in the basement of Joseph Papp's Public Theatre. The Photo Film
Workshop taught photography to ghetto youth, free of charge. Many of the
Workshop participants went on to successful careers and lives. To mention just
a few: Lenny Morris is a successful photographer, Fung Lam became DR. Fung Lam,
Llewellen Lennon is an architect and Angel Franco is a Pulitzer Prize winning
photo journalist with The New York Times. The Photo Film Workshop students
became top winners in any student photo contest they entered.

It was the unusual success stories of the students of the Photo Film
Workshop and the quality of their work that brought Ben to the attention of the
Dean of The New School, Michael Engl. Mr. Engl requested that Ben help build a
Photography Department at The New School.

David Levy remembers:

Ben Fernandez and I met in 1964. We took an instant dislike to one another.
Ben was a young photographer- on-the-make, who on the recommendation of the
legendary photographer/art director Alexey Brodovitch, had been hired to run
the photo-lab at Parsons. I was a young, uptight administrator trying to be a
photographer-on-the- make. This did not auger well for good chemistry between
us and it got worse in a few years when Ben, an intuitive teacher with an
instinctive understanding of young people, became mentor for a group of
particularly rebellious, though exceptionally talented, students. And of course
the late 1960s was the apogee of student rebellion nationwide.

Looking back, I am surprised at how much I allowed Ben and his little
band to get under my skin because, in retrospect, they were exuberant, creative
innocents. One summer, for example, Ben had successfully lobbied for a larger
darkroom and we had closed the old photo lab to make the changes. Construction
schedules and contractors being no less problematic in the 1960s than they are
today, fall classes began and (surprise) the facility was not yet complete; a
situation that lasted about a month into the semester. In their frustration,
and to my fury, Ben's students created and mailed a poster to every member of
the Board of Trustees. It featured a photograph of the darkroom door with its
large, hand-written notice stating "Darkroom Closed for Construction." Down
below, in a screaming headline, was the punchline, SOMEDAY OUR PRINTS WILL
COME.

You really cannot stay mad at a guy with this kind of irreverence and,
though it must have taken about a decade, a great respect and friendship
ultimately grew between Ben and me. My change of heart probably began when I
saw the photographs he had taken in Puerto Rico, centering on his FOUR
GENERATIONS series. I was stunned both by the visual and emotional sensitivity
of this work, which seemed so out of character with the rough-and-tumble
persona Ben affected. And so I began to look further both at the work and the
man.

This new respect for Ben, coupled with my knowledge of his extraordinary
success as the architect of The New School's photography program (which he had
started from scratch prior to Parsons' 1970 merger with the university )
persuaded me a few years later to ask him to build a brand new, four-year
photography major at Parsons and to appoint him chairman of the nascent new
department. Prior to this time photography had only been a service course for a
couple of curricular areas. Not surprisingly, Ben's energy and the creativity
of his approach to this new curriculum quickly created a strong and influential
department that commanded international attention and acclaim.

Working with Ben in those years, building new and imaginative programs in
New York, California, Paris and the Dominican Republic ( to name a few ),was an
experience that strengthened our mutual professional respect and also became
the basis for a deepening and ultimately profound friendship. I cannot count
the times since then that I have drawn upon Ben's wide-ranging and detailed
knowledge of photography, boats, politics, the vagaries of the internal
combustion engine or the human condition. I know of no one who brings greater
personal generosity to his work and life, and I know of no one with a greater
capacity to undertake the responsibilities of friendship.

Fernandez is one of the best photographers of our time and his work
demonstrates the range of his interests and the power of his insight, to say
nothing of his technical skill. These attributes coalesce in works of art that
tell us much about our moment in history. They will live among the icons of
photography in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Parsons School of Design has been privileged to have had the boundless good
will and creative energies of Ben Fernandez, particularly during those critical
formative years, from 1970 through the early 1980s, when it grew from a
non-degree granting school of 500 students in three rented floors of an old
truck garage to become the most influential college of art and design in the
world. Parsons became virtually an arts university, offering multiple
undergraduate and graduate degrees at campuses on both coasts of the United
States, in France, the Dominican Republic, and Japan, with an aggregate
enrollment in excess of 10,000. Fernandez's contributions to this emerging
institution changed the lives of generations of students, just as his
imaginative approach to education in photography has influenced and enhanced
his profession for years to come.

David C. Levy
Past President and Director
Corcoran Museum of Art and College of Art and Design, Washington, DC
(Dr.Levy was Executive Dean and Chief Administrative Officer of Parsons School of Design from 1970 until 1989. He was Chancellor of The New School from 1989 until 1991)

Ben Fernandez brought many "firsts" to his new departments of
photography. Some of the more significant concepts were: Not having
professional teachers teaching but rather having professional photographers as
teachers. Some of the more notable photographers who participated were Lisette
Model, Diane Arbus, Philippe Halsman, Arnold Newman , George Tice and many
others.

He founded the FOCUS program which became an international series of
workshops and student exchange programs. FOCUS programs still run in
Germany. He also founded the LEICA MEDAL OF EXCELLENCE which has become a
prestigious photographic award.

Mr. Fernandez was asked to work as a consultant with E.Leitz and Co. to help
them understand, explore, and influence the college photographic community. He
worked with Lee Hill, the Vice President of E. Leitz, Inc. Mr. Hill wrote the
following in 1986:

This is to commend the significant contributions of Mr. Fernandez in
launching our LEICA MEDAL of EXCELLENCE . Mr. Fernandez was instrumental in the
development of the LEICA MEDAL of EXCELLENCE, having come up with the concept
and idea. He based his idea on the reputation of Leica and felt that the Leica
prestige could add to the popularity of a Medal award.

The first recipient of the award was Cornell Capa, Founder of ICP, who
referred to Ben, lovingly, as his "bastard son".

Other recipients of the Medal were world famous photographers, such as
Claudio Edinger, Charles Gatewood, Herlinde Koebl, William Albert Allard, Harry
Benson, Jill Freedman. Mary Ellen Mark, and Susan Meiselas.

BENEDICT J.FERNANDEZ, PHOTOGRAPHER

Ben Fernandez emerges from the period of intensified creative photography
that began in New York and has radiated into international art over the
past few decades. To a great extent, his path to photography was prepared by
the legendary Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971), who helped propel many others,
including the major portraitists and fashion photographers Richard Avedon and
Irving Penn, Brodovitch was Ben Fernandez's most important mentor and promoter,
a man who not only gave him difficult photographic projects to carry out but
awakened his talents as a teacher as well.

We now know Fernandez as a master of the camera. One could list a great
number of subjects he has approached from the standpoint of a concerned
observer. They would span the globe, from the U.S. to Europe and on to Japan
and China; they would also include people, individuals and groups, in his own
country, and simple, almost archaic still lifes. Any attempt to assign him to
one of the standard pigeon-holes of photographic art is doomed to failure. He
describes a situation or event in his very own unique, penetrating way, but
with an unwavering commitment to the human being. His visual statement often
rises to the status of a symbol, and thus a picture is created as a concentrate
of several others.

Fernandez's visual stories offer insights into particular spheres of
humanity or geography - the macho world of BIKERS, for example, who identify
with power of their motorcycles, or the bullfighters, who pretend superiority
over their victims.

In Puerto Rico he sees the elegance of the boulevards and the macho men
behind their window bars. In London he is interested in the speakers in Hyde
Park, with their bowler hats, and in the Bobbies in their towering helmets and
chin straps. In Bonn he is impressed with the characteristic gestures exchanged
by Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. Wherever he goes, he sees the old, the
passing culture in its striving for modernity. In Moscow, his gaze focuses upon
the Soldateska rising out of the past and the future-oriented scenery of the
new do-nothings. The clash between historical tradition and progressive
civilization in Japan concerns him as well, and all the more in China, where
yesterday grapples with tomorrow.

Back in America, his grand oeuvre, the stations in the life of Martin Luther
King (1929-1968), bears witness to his personal concern with the work of the
great Black leader, his death and its aftermath - an illustrated biography that
moves the reader to sympathy and contemplation.

It is not mere curiosity but instead his desire to express himself and to
communicate insights that drives the photographer Ben Fernandez and his
selected points of view out into familiar and unfamiliar worlds. His command of
his medium is so complete that his photographs require no further
commentary. They are forceful documents of an extraordinary personality.

And when, with the suddenness, and energy of a hurricane, the man himself
appears from time to time, we are fully captivated by his personality. This
over powering figure is a fountain of knowledge, experience - and suada. Ben
Fernandez is a monument to an entire photographic era that profits from the
past and looks towards the future. Photography, whose death knell may seem to
have been rung by electronic technology, is neither passť nor lost as long as
artists like Ben Fernandez still use the traditional camera to say what they
have to say.

Fritz L. Gruber
Founder of PHOTOKINA , Cologne, Germany

During the mid-Sixties, Ben Fernandez photographed throughout the streets of
New York becoming one of the most important street photographers of our time,
photographing a variety of socially significant events. Fernandez' photographs
of protest activities in the New York metropolitan area, as well as across the
country, served as a photographic diary of the protest movement of the
1960s.

Fernandez's powerful photographs of the last year of Dr. King's life invite
us to walk the streets with the photographer, sit in the family home of
Dr. King. His photographs serve as an extraordinary account and visual
testimony of a dedicated photojournalist who captured a period in this
country's history. Thirty eight years later they still speak to us with the
same message intended when they were first taken. The central message for the
photographer was to document, with great visual strength, the impact of Dr.King
on this country. Mr. Fernandez's photographs of Dr. King were first produced by
Kodak as 50 Limited Edition, numbered Portfolios titled "COUNTDOWN TO
ETERNITY". Most of these portfolios were donated to prestigious museums,
including The National Portrait Gallery, and universities.

A traveling exhibition, "Countdown to Eternity", consisting of 80 black and
white prints has traveled to all the major cities in America, to most of the
countries in Western Europe and 27 countries in Africa. This exhibition has
been in continuous circulation since 1990 and it continues to travel today.

Mental Poverty

Ghost Ellis Island

Books of Benedict Fernandez's work

IN OPPOSITION: Images of American Dissent in the Sixties, 1968

COUNTDOWN TO ETERNITY, 1993

PROTEST, American Edition, 1996

I AM A MAN, German Edition, 1996

Ben Fernandez is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards:

1999 - Senior Fellow in Photography, The Corcoran Museum of Art

1992 - Senior Fulbright Research Fellow in Photography

1986 - Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in China

1973 - National Endowment for the Arts Grant

1970 - Guggenheim Fellow

His work is in permanent collections in museums world wide

The Smithsonian

The National Portrait Gallery

The Corcoran Museum of Art

Museum of Modern Art

Houston Museum of Fine Arts

The Norton Simon Museum of Art

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The King Center

University of Tokyo

Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris

Today Ben Fernandez is busy with his exhibitions world wide and lecture
engagements.

He is married to the same lady for 50 years, come October 2007. He has two
grown children Benedict and Tiina and he is the proud grandfather of James,
Elizabeth, Noah, Leonardo and Owen.

He spends his time, when not traveling, between his home in Upstate New York
and his studio in New Jersey.